epub from Baen on Adobe Digital Editions: page numbers?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Madam Broshkina

But it was an ePub file.

Why can't publishers do proper formatting?

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why can't publishers do proper formatting?

Basically because it's not possible to get good typesetting with the current state of electronic book formats. ePub is certainly looking like the overall winner in the battle of formats going forward, especially with the iPad supporting it, but HTML was never designed to be a typesetting tool. If you want a book on your reader that is properly typeset, your only real option is to use a TeX- or InDesign-generated PDF. Everything else is going to trade off proper typesetting in the name of making the document re-flowable for different screen sizes and font choices. Until ePub evolves to include good hyphenation and paragraph-level formatting (or even page-level, now wouldn't that be a giant leap forward in computerized typesetting!) on the level of TeX or InDesign, ePubs are always going to look like something a secretary banged out on Word in an afternoon. Every time I've experimented with ePub, no matter how I tweak it, it always looks like crap on my Sony, and I just give up and go back to PDF. Hopefully it won't always be that way. For now, if I buy an ePub, I just break the DRM and spend an afternoon putting the from the HTML chapters into InDesign and exporting a PDF. It looks SO much better. The only disadvantage is re-flow capability and the file size (the PDF files are a good 3 times bigger than the ePubs), but SD cards are cheap and I never want to change the font size anyway, so it works for me.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Until ePub evolves to include good hyphenation and paragraph-level formatting

There's no reason (other than computational and programming resources) why any ePUB reader could not include that. Those are tasks for the renderer, not features of the format.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There's no reason (other than computational and programming resources) why any ePUB reader could not include that. Those are tasks for the renderer, not features of the format.

Exactly. People seem to think that the best rendering you can get out of an epub is what a browser would display for the XHTML. That's nonsense.

Prince XML is the perfect example. It accepts HTML and outputs PDF and near-LaTeX quality (I said near). So one can obviously make a good quality HTML renderer. There's no reason why something like Prince XML cannot be the backend processor that generates frames for the device's framebuffer.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There's no reason (other than computational and programming resources) why any ePUB reader could not include that. Those are tasks for the renderer, not features of the format.

Well, ok, then, I didn't realize that - that makes it even more ridiculous that the various ereaders out there supporting ePub don't implement a rendering engine to handle this, then. But basically, the point still holds: until a quality rendering engine is used, ePub output really looks very poor compared to quality typesetting such as one gets from TeX or InDesign. Even that needs to be hand-tuned for print publication, but I'd be pretty satisfied with just what a good rendering engine would produce on the fly if some reader manufacturer cared enough to implement it. Whatever Sony is using on the 505 really sucks dirt. Just getting full justification won't solve that problem, either, unless they use a renderer that does good hyphenation and paragraph-level formatting à la InDesign.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Whatever Sony is using on the 505 really sucks dirt. Just getting full justification won't solve that problem, either, unless they use a renderer that does good hyphenation and paragraph-level formatting à la InDesign.

Sony actually uses a precursor to Adobe's Mobile Reader SDK, what we here popularly call "ADE's engine", from Adobe Digital Editions which is a desktop application. But the version on the Sony is really old.

And Adobe makes InDesign too, and I'm told that uses the same paragraph algorithm as TeX. So theoretically, we could see something very nice in the future.

Don't hold your breath though.

[Joykins]

I wouldn't mind if we could do our own css instead of relying on 2 fonts and 4 sizes or whatever on the nook!